Instead of waiting for Black Friday, RTX 3060-related price drops, and Christmas sales, I jumped the gun and ordered a EVGA RTX 2060 SC (Superclocked). It's the vanilla RTX 2060, I know, and it's late 2020, I know. But there's something about EVGA cards that just makes them look better than what local choices are available here in the Philippines. What we do have here in the Philippines is Galax, Gigabyte, Zotac, MSI, and Asus.
You might ask what I have against such manufacturers and the answer might surprise you. It's their really over-the-top branding on their GPU. It makes the GPU look overly gaudy (Galax, Asus, Gigabyte) or just outright out of place (Zotac, damn the way they slapped Zotac and RTX on the shroud is atrocious to be honest lol)
Anyway, so what you actually need to do is go to Newegg, then select your region. Items available will depend on this so choose honestly.
This isn't a shopping guide so I won't cover everything. But I will tell you to avoid being scammed or outright surprised by the unexpected, turn the following options on:
That way you won't have a Lazada-like experience of 3rd party vendors in your catalog. Reason being it might be harder to deal with them with warranty.
Paying for your items is pretty straightforward for they accept Visa and Mastercard, or if you want to use PayPal they support that as well. I used PayPal with my order though.
Now for the fun part. How the item will actually get to you, dear reader, in the Philippines or to what other place that isn't USA.
Much to my surprise, the SSD isn't in the same Newegg warehouse as the rest of the items. It's at the other coast of America.
Above is the screenshot of my order. Of course I have scrubbed it out of any meaningful tracking information. At the time of purchase and at the time of posting this, December 13th of 2020, Newegg is running a free shipping promo for orders 15,000 PHP and above. Aside from the graphics card, I also included an SSD and RAM. Both of those I can easily get in the Philippines but bruh when I compared Lazada prices vs Newegg, it was actually cheaper to buy abroad this time around lol.
Once you're done paying for your items. You'll be notified of the charges made to your credit card and not later than 24 hours you will get shipping information.
Shipping was through UPS. UPS' local partner here in the Philippines is apparently Air21 but it was 2GO that delivered both of my orders. The parcel from California arrived within the delivery window of 10 days but the one from New York took 12 days.
You would expect it would be shipped from California to Anchorage (Alaska btw), then down to somewhere in Japan or HK but boy oh boy I was wrong. Like all UPS packages, first, it went to their Worldport facility in Kentucky first, then flew out to Dubai (UAE), then to Shenzen (CH), then to Clark (PH), and finally to my home province of Misamis Oriental. That's about 2/3 around the world. The same thing happened to the 2nd package. I lost the detailed tracking information though, should've saved those and did this blog earlier.
UPS has in-house custom clearance and my purchase already included VAT so I didn't have to pay any import fee or any fee, or contact customs for that matter.
Yeah they disinfected it at some point.
When will we see the packaging upgraded from carton though?
You can watch the unboxing video here. The smaller parcel, the SSD, arrived in this:
Yep, one of those envelopes with built-in bubble wrap.
It didn't get squished lol. Of course there's some minor bend in the box but it wasn't bad enough to dent the plastic shroud protecting the actual SSD.
To sum it up, the experience was seamless. Go to Newegg if you are unable to find or your favorite store is unable to order parts (like EVGA cards damn they're so hard to find and order in PH). Or if for some odd reason the item you want is cheaper in Newegg (VAT and Shipping included) than in Lazada or that store Kris Aquino is promoting, I say give it a shot. Those memes and posts circulating of bent graphics card from Newegg are outliers. Your precious GPU is just as prone from being bent with local couriers, especially if the couriers are feeling a bit like playing basketball for some reason but instead of using a ball, they're using your parcel.
For me, only EVGA's aesthetic suited my needs. None of the fat shrouds of other brands. None of the fancy RGBs. None of the out of place RTX badges yuck. Sadly EVGA added that red lip thing in their RTX 3000 series and I feel absolutely betrayed.
In hindsight, seeing the shitshow the RTX 30 series and RX6000 launches have been, I'm glad to have brought this card instead of waiting for stocks to stabilize. The 3070s and 3060s here in PH are way out of SRP and even major retailers are using the gray market to acquire sufficient stock. Anyway, since I only play Black Desert Online most of the time, what's the need for a 3000-series card lol.
Thank you for reading through this rant, now go ahead and do your first newegg order.
